Suburbia has been turned upside down.
Picture the scene. It is almost midnight, a warm summer’s night in one of Johannesburg’s more cosmopolitan northern suburbs. A full, white moon dangles in the clear sky, surrounded by twinkling stars.
Suddenly the peace of the suburban night is shattered by the screeching of rubber on tar as a driver, heading at speed from Sandton towards Rosebank, slams on the brakes and slithers into an unavoidable swerve. A sickening crunch of metal on metal and shattering glass as two cars collide. And then silence.
Slowly the night, whose sounds you had not noticed before, comes back to life. Cars slow on the busy artery of Oxford Road to gawk at the scene. A murmur of voices as pedestrians and idlers who frequent this corner start to tell and retell the events of the last few moments for the benefit of newcomers. The drivers of the two damaged vehicles slam out of their cars to yell recriminations at each other. And then the distant, whining growl of tow trucks racing each other to the scene.
From the balcony of my apartment I can see nothing of this. It is all an intimate soundtrack, the scene itself obscured by the lush barrier of leaves that makes this suburb so attractive. Natural curiosity is now obscured by an expensively guarded privacy — the well-tended garden, and the head-high, creeper-covered fence that keeps us secure from the dangers (and temptations) of the world outside.
But then, through the lowest part of the leaf cover, I see a human head emerge from the undergrowth. For a moment I am startled. Could this be a victim of the accident, a passenger flung several metres from the scene of impact to come to rest, disorientated and perhaps seriously injured, against our perimeter fence?
The immediate instinct is to rush downstairs and offer help. But something makes me hesitate. The owner of the head, having looked carefully around, begins to stand upright. I cannot tell the gender, or even the race of this individual. But gradually, in the gloomy light that flickers from the street lamps, I realise that it is naked from the waist down, and is in the process of pulling up its underwear.
Then, as the figure pulls her short skirt down and rearranges it around her hips, I realise that it is one of the local street hookers, disturbed in the act of relieving herself in the bushes. She steps into the street, and saunters on the high heels of her leather boots towards the scene of the crash.
A moment later, out of eyeshot again, her voice has joined those of a couple of shrill colleagues, two security guards from an adjacent building site, some passers-by, the drivers of the two crashed cars and three tow truck operators who are vying for the right to cash in on the disaster.
The prostitutes are the most irate, their voices the most strident through the leaves that still cut off the unfolding drama from my sight. The accident, after all, has disrupted the peaceful rhythm of the corner where they have come to take it as a right to ply their thankless, dangerous, devil-may-care trade.
The whores have been a fixture in the night landscape of this respectable, still mostly white, neighbourhood for a long time, long before we moved in. The grim silence of the respectable ratepayers in the face of this eye-catching but disturbing onslaught seems to speak of an uneasy acceptance that all sorts of ills would follow the dismantling of influx control and curfew regulations.
The police sneak up in their vans from time to time. They might catch the odd punter, scare him up a bit, and then let him go. They might extort a small bribe from one of the women. Or sometimes there will be sounds of an angry scuffle before she is bundled into the back of the van.
She will seldom protest her innocence. She will more likely give the cops a piece of her mind and challenge them to do their worst. More often than not she will get away with it.
It is a peculiar, conniving world —the silent listeners in the surrounding apartment blocks, the crude policemen, the girls with their coarse laughter, and the clients, furtive men in expensive cars, sneaking in, picking up a woman, and sneaking out again — sometimes causing accidents, like the one I have just witnessed, in their haste to separate themselves from the scene of their recent adventures.
In recent weeks this delicately balanced ecosystem has been turned upside down. The bulldozers have moved in on our suburb.
In the name of making Sandton an acceptably glamorous, First World type of place for the better appreciation of some 65 000 delegates expected to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the authorities have proceeded with the long-delayed task of widening Oxford Road, thus rearranging the logic of the surrounding area. While the peace of generally law-abiding residents has been shattered by the rude decibels of road drills and construction equipment during the day, the prostitutes have been startled away from their usual habitats by night.
Roads have been diverted, cutting off the logical access and exit routes of potential clients. The accelerated construction process has brought more and more security guards into the area, their owlish eyes staring into every corner of the night, passively doing what the police aggressively failed to do before — keeping the privacy-seeking, passion-hunting punters at bay, out of fear of discovery. The prostitutes, anxious for trade, pop up more brazenly, in streets where they were never seen before.
When this is all over, the prestige of the World Summit will be assured.
When the summit is over, the residents of this formerly quiet suburb will keep to their acquiescent silence as the new highway sends up an ever-ascending roar of progress beneath their balconies.
And the prostitutes will sink deeper into the shadows, in this suburb or the next — another hungry, openly secret subtext to the pious phrases fading around the prosperous towers of Sandton.